Use Webflow CMS to create a multi-page website

What is it:

A job board for the video game space

Maker Insight:

how to use references in webflow to create dynamic views

What did I learn:

1. Webflow CMS - John uses Webflow on the front end to display job posts on his main landing page. What I thought interesting was how well he synched up this experience when you click on a job post in the list. It opens up a new page without leaving his site. Normally, in no-code job boards, this job post would link directly to the post that it was listed from and consequently the user would leave the site.

What I thought really interesting was how this was created. Because John was generous to share he detailed that it is an automated process set up. He details more below:

Example: https://www.leaderboardjobs.com/jobs/remote-frontend-developer-interactive-web-design-angular

John describes it here: "That functionality is from webflows cms. I set the main page as a collection wrapper and each job post goes to the job template I set up in webflows cms". This allows a great user experience and functionality enabled by Webflow. If you have a use case where you are listing information, this type of user experience is ideal.

John is also using Jetboost.io to create a real time dynamic filtering list of information. This is the best tool to use to create this type of functionality with Webflow.

2. Product insight - weekly newsletter. Building a job board is hard. Its even harder to monetize.

I think this piece of information is useful for businesses that may not have frequent repeat visits that don't establish a habit for user retention.

The author of Hooked, by Nir Eyal who writes about building habit forming products says that you must atleast engage a user once a week to establish a habit.

If you have a product like John's that is a job board, where user's most likely will not visit every week how will you continue to engage them so that you can provide continual value?

And more importantly, how will you capture value and further monetize so that you can continue to provide your service?

This product demonstrates how you can do that. At the top of the page is a newsletter sign up. His value prop to incentivize sign up to the newsletter is "get the best jobs delivered to your inbox". This is a great start. But I would challenge John to expand upon this and go deeper. I would recommend that he aggregate articles, or content or news around his niche market, the video game space. If he provides this within his newsletter he now has interesting content that is useful to all users who may or may not be looking for a job at the moment.

Instead of just offering jobs, by offering other interesting content, he can now distribute that content through this social channels or brand channel on twitter, and get more sign ups to his newsletter. Once he starts getting more signups, he will have increased the % of people that happen to be looking for a job. The more people that he has in his network, the greater the price he can charge for job postings.

This creates a flywheel of growth and value to himself as an entrepreneur, to the companies looking for talent and to the applicants looking for the best place to find video game jobs.

Right now John is not charging to post a job. If he substantially increases his community of subscribers, not just website visitors he has a sustainable business model and a potential very lucrative one at that.

3. Typeform - This is much more than a just a forms. Typeform is expensive form builder but you can use it for its basic free tier to get the job done. I'd recommend using this tool if you are calculating a formula, adding business logic or providing some type of personalization output from a users answers. It's a tool I highly recommend to use for this type of use case. If you are just needing a form, google forms is a basic form with a lower learning curve to use. And it's free.

In this product, John is using it for job submissions. Likely he has it integrated to his google sheets via Zapier. Depending on if he wants to verify the job submission or not, he may want to sanity check it and not have it automatically post into his Webflow CMS.

One other item you should consider that no-one really tells you about is integrating your forms to your backend. John is using google sheets as his backend. For a product like this, John doesn't need instant API polling from Typeform to google sheets with Zapier. This is technical terms for the service that Zapier provides which just means when someone completes a Typeform, Zapier doesnt automatically send it to google sheets. It costs a lot of money on the Zapier plan to send it near real time.

If you need near real time passing of data from your form builder to google sheets, you may want to consider using goolge forms. Because Google forms will send automatically to google sheets.

That is the hard thing about building. Not knowing the details of things like that are important when selecting the right tools the first time. You may need to know that but the problem is that you learn that after you have sunk time into building with a tool that may not deliver the output you want.